A touch overlong but required reading for any maritime enthusiast.
In his first book to be published in the United States, famed shipwreck hunter Mearns (The Search for the Sydney, 2009, etc.) provides an engrossing collection of his most exciting undersea finds.
With stories that would befit an adventure novel, the author recounts seven of his dramatic shipwreck journeys, including a number of famed World War II ships (like the HMS Hood and the HMAS Sydney), a 15th-century vessel belonging to Vasco da Gama’s fleet, and commercial freighters featuring sordid histories straight out of a soap opera. Beyond the stories of the ships themselves, Mearns, a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and the Explorers Club, shows how the life of a shipwreck hunter is itself dramatic and fraught with risk. “I have experienced,” he writes, “just about every emotion imaginable for a person in charge of such costly and technically complex adventures….Searching for shipwrecks is basically an all-or-nothing proposition, where you either find what you are looking for or go home empty-handed.” The chapters are only loosely connected, with little overarching narrative arc, but the author does well to keep his tales highly entertaining and understandable for lay readers. Mearns doesn’t ignore the necessary technical detail, but he smartly keeps it to a minimum. At the end, the author includes two ships he’d yet like to find, but one of them—the USS Indianapolis—was located in 2017. While Robert Ballard’s 1985 discovery of the Titanic remains the most famous individual shipwreck find (and therefore made him the most famous hunter as well), Mearns deserves a spot in the upper echelon of deep-sea explorers, not only for his work of finding lost wrecks, but also for his continued efforts, along with the oceanographic community, to map the entire ocean floor.
A touch overlong but required reading for any maritime enthusiast.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-760-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.
A lively history of the Ohio River region in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.
McCullough (The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, 2015, etc.) isn’t writing about the sodbusters and hardscrabblers of the Far West, the people whom the word “pioneers” evokes, but instead their predecessors of generations past who crossed the Appalachians and settled in the fertile country along and north of the Ohio River. Manasseh Cutler, one of his principal figures, “endowed with boundless intellectual curiosity,” anticipated the movement of his compatriots across the mountains well before the war had ended, advocating for the Northwest Ordinance to secure a region that, in McCullough’s words, “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life”—a place in which slavery was forbidden and public education and religious freedom would be emphasized. “Ohio fever” spread throughout a New England crippled, after the war, by economic depression, but Southerners also moved west, fomenting the conditions that would, at the end of McCullough’s vivid narrative, end in regional war three generations later. Characteristically, the author suggests major historical themes without ever arguing them as such. For example, he acknowledges the iniquities of the slave economy simply by contrasting the conditions along the Ohio between the backwaters of Kentucky and the sprightly city of Cincinnati, speaking through such figures as Charles Dickens. Indeed, his narrative abounds with well-recognized figures in American history—John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Johnny Appleseed—while highlighting lesser-known players. His account of Aaron Burr—who conspired to overthrow the government of Mexico (and, later, his own country) after killing Alexander Hamilton, recruiting confederates in the Ohio River country—is alone worth the price of admission. There are many other fine moments, as well, including a brief account of the generosity that one farmer in Marietta, Ohio, showed to his starving neighbors and another charting the fortunes of the early Whigs in opposing the “anti-intellectual attitude of the Andrew Jackson administration.”
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6868-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
